Donald's $5,000 Cheque: An Election Bribe, and Poland Off the Table

Les faits d'abord. According to Le Monde, at a rally in Florida on Friday evening, Donald again promised $5,000 to every American should Republicans win the midterm elections. The paper notes the questions over the measure's legality and its funding. That is all we know. No text, no costing, no timetable.

A useful clarification: our initial angle was Poland, the suspension of the president of the constitutional court and the tug-of-war between a nationalist presidency and a centrist government. The dispatch contains nothing on that. No Polish fact will therefore be advanced here. What remains is the underlying question, which applies to Washington as much as to Warsaw: who holds the state apparatus, and for whom?

Let us start with the cheque. Cui bono? In the short term, the candidate waving it. In the long term, nobody on a wage. A promise whose legality and funding are unknown is a ballot paper dressed up as public policy. Our reading: a loyalty to the electorate is being bought with a sum nobody knows how to finance. Should it ever be paid, the bill would come through taxation, debt or cuts to services, following the old principle that the state takes back with one hand what it grants with the other. Rosa Luxemburg reminded us that a concession is worth what it does for the balance of forces among workers, not what it yields in votes. A one-off transfer does not organise them. It isolates them, each standing alone before their letterbox.

The point on legality is more instructive still. If the law gets in the way of the promise, that is where the real game is played: in the courts, the administrations, the regulatory bodies. Lenin held the state to be an "organ of class rule" (our translation, The State and Revolution). Its internal friction is not a quarrel over procedure. It is a conflict between factions of the ruling classes over how the apparatus is run, and over who commands it.

This is the grid we would apply to Warsaw if we had the facts: a constitutional court, a presidency, a government, and the question of which faction of power controls the referee. We will return to it once the newsroom has sources. In the meantime, let us not tell ourselves stories. Whether it is courts or cheques, these battles are almost always fought between people who manage the same order. The wage earner, meanwhile, is invited to applaud and to vote.

What we expect from Le Monde and others: the text of the measure, its cost, its legal basis. Without these, it is just a slogan with a figure attached.